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Friends turned out for the Ned Ames Honorary Reception and Lecture on June 24. This year’s speaker, President Emeritus Dr. Gene E. Likens, spoke about lessons learned from 50 years of research at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest.

The Cary Institute has embarked on an ambitious study that will test environmental interventions with the potential to reduce tick-borne disease in neighborhoods. The goal: to lower Lyme disease rates and protect public health.

A former president of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Dutchess County is one of 375 members of the National Academy of Sciences who has signed an open letter to draw attention to the perils of climate change.

Whoever named the "temperate zone" must have had a sense of humor. I'm writing this during a week of humid, 90-degree days, and just a few months ago it was 13 below, a stiff north wind providing the icing on that frozen cake. Since then, we've had rain, snow, sleet, warm spells, cold snaps and thunderstorms.

You shouldn't put illegal drugs in your body, and you shouldn't let neighborhood bodies of water ingest them, either. A new study suggests that aquatic life in Baltimore is being exposed to drugs, and it's having an impact.

When the scientists behind an ambitious tick study began their work in April, they did not know how many Dutchess County families would be willing to grant access to their properties and personal health information.

Ecologists put on an unconventional fashion show at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Each showcased a custom-made garment that artistically depicted his or her own field of research, the organism or environment to which they’d devoted their life and careers — their hearts on their sleeves.

In coastal communities, the fear of rising sea levels has put climate adaptation and resilience planning at the forefront of shoreline management programs in recent years. But for inland water communities, the impacts of climate change, while perhaps not as obvious as regular coastal flooding events or as scary as sea level rise predictions, are no less real.

On a Thursday morning in May, I follow researcher Kelly Oggenfuss into the forest on the grounds of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. Stopping at an orange flag, she picks up a footlong metal box. With a gloved hand, she extracts a terrified-looking rodent. "These guys," she says, pinching the mouse between the shoulder blades, "are really good at passing along Lyme disease to ticks."

Over the course of the past year or so, there have been a number of incredible tech projects aimed at stopping the spread of Ebola. One approach that we’ve never come across before, however, involves plotting the possible spread of Ebola and other “filoviruses” of the same family by predicting which bat species they’re most likely to be carried by

As an investigation by scientists at Duke University and the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies shows, the value of long-term studies can't be understated. In it, investigators looking at the impacts of acid rain on the soil acidity of a New Hampshire forest found that everything behaved as expected for about a decade. But after that, the system went haywire.

Amid political turmoil in Brazil, there is a threat to abolish the country's environmental licensing process, derailing decades of conservation efforts in the Amazon. Cary Institute Graduate Student Fellow Rafael Almeida, Visiting Scientist Fabio Roland, and Trustee Tom Lovejoy discuss all we stand to lose in a letter published in the July 15 issue of Science.

A team of scientists has developed a model that can predict bat species most likely to transmit Ebola and other filoviruses. Findings highlight new potential hosts and geographic hotspots worthy of surveillance. So reports a new paper in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

The Adirondack Park Invasive Plant Program (APIPP) and the Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK) are co-hosting an Adirondack Forest Pest Summit, a free conference meant to help raise awareness about invasive insects negatively affecting New York forests. The event will take place at the Tannery Pond Community Center in North Creek from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Monday, July 11th.

A legacy of acid rain has acidified forest soils throughout the northeastern US, lowering the growth rate of trees. In an attempt to mitigate this trend, in 1999 scientists added calcium to an experimental forest in New Hampshire. Tree growth recovered, but a decade later there was a major increase in the nitrogen content of stream water draining the site.

There are many infections in humans which originate from animals. Diseases which spread in this way are called zoonoses. Zika is one example and was first discovered in a monkey with a mild fever in the Zika forest in Uganda in the 1940s. Another is Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome or MERS – which originates in camels.

Of all the ailments that plague people, the majority began like these three: with a bacteria, virus, parasite or other pathogen that jumped from an innocuous animal host to the human population. But there's no global database documenting where these kinds of infections — called zoonoses — might be lying in wait.